Six Feet Under Creator Gets Bloody

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Alan Ball and Anna Paquin on their new vampire series.

By Travis Fickett

Angel may be gone, and Moonlight suffered an early demise (is it "second-demise" for the undead?) – but the Vampire genre is eternal. This latest incarnation is from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, who is bringing to the screen the series of novels by Charlaine Harris. The world is a slightly different take on vampire mythology. Vampires are no longer secret, and now that a "synthetic blood" has been perfected, vampires are trying to become full members of society. The series stars Anna Paquin as a young woman who becomes involved with a vampire, which is possibly more than she bargained for. We had a chance to attend the presentation of the show, where Ball and Paquin talked to the assembled journalists at the Televsion Critics association event in Beverly Hills.

Asked what this show might do different for vampires on television, Ball remarked that "I think it's pretty lame when you let your vampire go out in the day just because you don't want to shoot at night. I personally have never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel. I don't -- I'm not really a big vampire fanatic. This was really my first. I've never read the Anne Rice books. This was really my first foray into the world of vampires. All I knew was the movies that I'd seen…I can tell you some specific ways the mythology differs. Vampires -- in our world, a lot of the myths about vampires were created by vampires themselves over history so that they could pass because, if you could convince everybody that, you know, you couldn't be seen in a mirror or that you would freak out if somebody shoved a crucifix in your face, then you could prove you weren't a vampire pretty easily."

He continued by elaborating on some of the specifics of the physical nature of the vampires in True Blood. "We went to great pains to sort of depict a certain kind of physiology for the fangs where they actually are retracted like rattlesnake fangs, and then they click forward. I wanted to approach the supernatural not as being something that exists outside of nature, but something that is more deeply rooted in nature, perhaps more so than our physiological perception apparatus is equipped to perceive. There are differences in what happens to vampires being staked. I wanted to avoid the instantaneous incineration or the instantaneous turning into dust. I wanted to avoid the vampires getting strange contact lenses when their fangs came out or any sort of head prosthetic because, first of all, it's a TV show. We don't have time or money to do that and, second of all, just let the actors act it. Give them fangs, and that's all they need.

"There is a specific thing that happens in our show to vampires who get staked which is probably different than what we've seen before. There's what happens to vampires when they burn in a fire that is different than what we've seen before. But, for the most part, I didn't really want to focus too much on visual effects or special effects. I wanted it to be show about characters and to really explore what it means to be 170 years old and what it means to fall in love with somebody who basically part of the relationship would involve, in a world that's mutually satisfying, being fed upon, you know, not being able to see this person except at night, having the entire town think, what? Are you crazy? and that kind of thing."